In a bid to prevent abuse and reduce the spread of false information across its platform, Facebook has taken down more than 10,000 allegedly fake Pages, Groups and accounts in Mexico and across Latin America.

A figurine is seen in front of the Facebook logo. Image: Reuters

Stating that these fake pages and groups violated its community standards, Facebook's head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher put out a blog post mentioning that there is no place for such behaviour on the platform. Gleicher said that Facebook is proactively trying to tackle the presence of such "bad actors" on the platform and rooting them out.

He said that the need to take action was especially critical in the run-up to elections, as this is when people are found to be discussing and debating on views and ideologies the most. With the 2019 general elections coming up in India, this is an initiative that will surely be appreciated by a lot of Indian internet users as well.

Adding more numbers, Gleicher stated that Facebook had taken down "837 million pieces of spam, 2.5 million pieces of hate speech and disabled 583 million fake accounts globally" within the first quarter of 2018.

Much of this was supposedly acted upon before it was even reported to Facebook, which was attributed to the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence and computer vision by the company.

Facebook is also working with third-party fact-checkers to stop the spread of fake news and it is also make advertising more transparent, so users are aware when ads are being targetted towards them.

Facebook has been lately very focussed on fighting fake news and recently also hired a team to prevent the worst things that can be done using the platform.

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